First, let me say that I'm thrilled with the great work that's being done on Mint, and consider it one of the very few "sane" (and darned good) desktop Linux OSes out there. I use it on two machines.

My question is this:Linux Mint's installer and web site prominently say that it's the "4th most widely-used OS in the world." I got curious about this, since I found it somewhat unexpected, and did a fair bit of searching for which OSes have which market shares. I wanted to know if this claim was really true, and what the other OSes were. Also, I wanted to know whether, for example, all Windows OSes were being lumped together to get this result.

Surprisingly, after a half-dozen searches on Google, I couldn't find any OS usage chart that even mentioned Linux Mint (rather than simply, "Linux") when compared to non-Linux operating systems. So, how did the folks at Linux Mint come up with this statistic? I understand that LM is the most popular Linux distribution in the world (with good reason, IMHO), but if we're lumping all Linuxes together, then it's equally fair to lump all Mac OSes and Windows OSes together. Therefore:

1) Windows2) Mac OS3) Linux4) Unix and others

I suspect that you all can see the problem with this. Can someone please set my overactive brain at-ease about this issue?

Started in 2006, Linux Mint is now the 4th most widely used home operating system behind Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS and Canonical's Ubuntu.

Key words being "home operating system". So excluding corporate and server operating systems, but also "smart" cars, "smart" refrigerators, "smart" phones, "smart" TVs--and anything else that is "smart" these days Most of those run either Linux or Android (which uses the Linux kernel).